On the recordJuly 10, 2012
I thank the gentleman. It was interesting, we just had a hearing in one of the committees here in Congress, and we had four witnesses who were speculating about the fear and the myths and all the things that they hypothesize could be terrible if the Affordable Care Act were to go into effect. And then we had one witness who was the worst nightmare for those people, who was a Massachusetts businessperson with a thousand employees, president of the largest Chamber of Commerce in the country, was a member of the board of directors of one of the larger banks, and was in fact the regional consultant to the Fed in that area, who said that since Massachusetts accepted the equivalent of the Affordable Care Act, not only his business has done better and his employers have done better and his profits have gone up, but in Massachusetts the economy has done better, more people have been working, less people have been using the emergency room, and more employers are covering their employees. And in fact, that's what it is. The facts certainly outweigh all the speculation and the myth and the fearmongering that we see going on. There are millions of people who are already taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act. One of those in my district is Terry Palary, whose son is a firefighter who's working towards his paramedic certificate and who has to spend hundreds of hours in an internship that's not paid for. He's 23 years old.…
